NHSX and Mental Health Update 9

This is an informal update to NHSX’s commitment to:

Digital and data specialists from NHSX will team up with NHS England’s mental health national policy teams to help clinicians and policymakers improve patient experience through technology.

This is a selection of things that happened (other things also happened) from team members working on a discovery into children, young people and mental health…

User research with Dorset CAMHS

Two of the team took a trip to Poole and Bournemouth to conduct user research. We visited two different sites dedicated to children and young people’s mental health services (CYPMHS) and spoke with clinical and managerial staff about their experiences and how the service works.

This was the discovery’s first user research sessions with front line staff.

It was an extremely useful trip for furthering our knowledge, we really appreciated that people took the time out from their busy jobs to talk to us.

Waiting time pilots

There are wider efforts with NHS England to address waiting times. 12 pilots have begun around the country and 2 fantastic colleagues walked us through the progress so far.

It is interesting to see how our team fits in a broader ambition to improve things and we managed to get some invites which should put us in the same room as those working on the pilots.

User research with Wirral CAMHS

Out in the Wirral today with incredibly kind CAMHS staff learning about how they are supporting young people and parents whilst they wait. #cypmhs @nhsx @ColinPattinson 📝☎️📚 pic.twitter.com/kLbp2WDawp

— Sophie Rankin (@SophieAnnRankin) September 5, 2019

Not only did the team manage to get over to Dorset but we went over to the Wirral to hear more from staff who are delivering care. The service is setup differently and once again a fascinating experience to be immersed in the real setting, hearing from real people about how care is delivered and some of the pain points they face.

We got the chance to hear from people receiving referrals, triaging people to get the care they need, clinician who sees children and young people and also the health professionals responsible for a phone line that gives advice and support for parents, children and young people with mental health concerns.

We’ve got more places to visit and people to see before we bring the research together but the passion and dedication of trying to deliver care is always very striking.

Show and tells

One of the team spoke at the wider NHS England mental health team meeting to give a swooping overview of work so far. Very kind crowd and interesting question asked after update. We continue to try our best to be vocal and transparent with what we are doing.

Retrospective and planning

As sprint 2 ended we officially passed the halfway point for this discovery. We got together for our regular retrospective. 2 new NHSX colleagues sat in and got to listen to insights about our work alongside some themed music choices. We are a tight-knit unit and always keep pushing to improve - actions were created and progress was made to make things incrementally better.

Planning was later in the day. Priorities mostly centered around further research in sprint 3. We’ve got quite a lot lined up with children, young people, parents and more visits to CYPMHS. Lots of research and synthesizing research will be done among other tasks.

User research with children

We’ve been progressing with how best to elicit meaningful responses from children in our user research. We’ve made many iterations to our plans based on input from others outside the team. We are enjoying the methodological challenge of researching with young children.

Facebook follow-up discussion

To learn about other research and efforts in the CYP mental health/wellbeing space we had a follow up chat with individual we met a couple of weeks ago.

Illuminating chat. For example, we heard more about communities/peer-support on social media such as groups like Parenting Mental Health. Their site also has many stories of individuals experience of being a parent/guardian of someone experiencing mental health issues.

Idea to scrape reviews of CYPMHS

We have invested a small amount of time into collecting reviews of CYPMHS clinics on NHS.UK to supplement our user research, to see if we can identify any themes across different sites. While only a limited number of reviews are available, and we are aware of bias, we are hoping we might get something interesting out of the exercise. Even if we don’t get the volume of data we were hoping for this work can provide us with another research tool for future projects.

Find out more

If you want to stay informed about wider NHSX work then check out @NHSX on Twitter.

If you want to give us feedback or get in touch with the team then you can do so using this form!